Near Mimi in the grass, a boy in chitin-looking clothing says, into his hand, “Where’s the nearest place I can buy some sunscreen?” A pleasant woman answers, “Here’s what I found for you!” Mimi holds her phone close to her face. She bounces from news to pictures, analysis to video. Somewhere in this tiny black monolith is a bit of her father. Pieces of his brain and soul. She whispers into her own phone’s mic, “Where’s the nearest police station?” A map appears, showing the fastest route and how many minutes it would take her to walk. Five-point-three. The boy in the bug-skeleton apparel tells his phone, “Play me some cowpunk,” and disappears into his wireless buds.
ADAM LIES in his bunk in a transfer facility, while the overflowing federal system searches for space to house him. There will be no appeal. He’s watching a film on the phosphenes inside his closed eyelids of a bearded man confronting the court. The lack of remorse or bargaining. The wife, two rows behind him, going to pieces. Soon we’ll know if we were right or wrong.
He wonders how he found it in him to use the word we. But he’s glad he did. Everything was we, back then. A surrender to cooperative existence. We, the five of us. No separate trees in a forest. What had they hoped to win? Wilderness is gone. Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that’s where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.
The coming massacre was their authority—a cataclysm large enough to pardon every fire the five of them lit. That cataclysm will still come, he’s sure of it, long before his seventy plus seventy years are up. But not soon enough to exonerate him.
THE WINDOW in Douggie’s cell is too high up to see through. He stands underneath, pretending. The audio course has made him crazy to see a tree. Any anemic, stunted thing—the one thing from free-range life aside from Mimi he misses most, despite the shit they got him in. But the weird thing is, he can’t remember how they go. How a noble fir looks in profile. How the parts of an ironwood connect, the way the branches run. He’s even getting shaky about Engelmanns and hemlocks—trees he saw so damn many of, for so damn long. An elm, a tupelo, a buckeye: forget it. If he drew one now, it would be like some five-year-old’s crude crayon sketch. Cotton candy on a stick.
He didn’t look hard enough. He loved too little. More than enough to jail him, too little to get him through today. But he has hour after empty hour, with no great obligation but to keep from going apeshit crazy. His eyes close and he thrashes around for calm. He tries to summon the details that the audiotape reels off. The straight, bronze spears of beech buds. The buds of a red oak, massed on the branch tips like maces. The hollow end of a sycamore’s leaf stem, cupped over next year’s start. The taste of a black walnut and the look of its monkey-faced leaf scars.
After a while, they start to solidify—simple at first, but gaining grain. The way a maple in spring flushes red from the top. The polite applause of aspens. A yew reaching out, like a parent taking a child’s hand. Whiffs of scratched hickory nut. Dams break and memories flood him, like the million keyholes of light coming down through the palms of a horse chestnut. The angle between locust thorns. The turbulence in a piece of turned olive wood. Sprays of a mimosa’s foliage, like the tails of tropical birds. The secret writing on peeled-back birch bark, its words blurred and cryptic. Walking under Lombardy poplars where the calm was so heavy that even inhaling seemed a crime. Scraping against a cypress and thinking, This is what the afterlife should smell like.
He may be the richest man who ever lived. So rich he can lose it all and still turn a profit. He stands next to the green cinder-block wall, its paint like shiny, hardened flesh. He looks up into the fall of light and tries to recall. His hand presses where it always does, against the walnut in the side of his belly, just above his belt. Something is in there, a sizable seed, impossible to picture, not an ally, but life just the same.
ANOTHER RICH MAN—the sixty-third richest in Santa Clara County—sits in his own confinement, typing into a screen. Does it matter where? The words Neelay writes add to a growing organism, one that has just now begun to add to itself. At other screens in other cities, all the best coders that several hundred million dollars can hire contribute to the work in progress. Their brand-new venture into cooperation is off to the most remarkable beginning. Already their creatures swallow up whole continents of data, finding in them the most surprising patterns. Nothing needs to start from scratch. There’s so much digital germplasm already in the public domain.
The coders tell the listeners nothing except how to look. Then the new creations head off to scout the globe, and the code spreads outward. New theories, new offspring, and more evolving species, all of them sharing a single goal: to find out how big life is, how connected, and what it would take for people to unsuicide. The Earth has become again the deepest, finest game, and the learners just its latest players. Wild in their diversity, they fly up, flock into the datasphere like origami birds. Some will thrive for a while, then fall away. The ones that hit on something right will increase and multiply. As Neelay has learned with the greatest pain: Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory.
. . .
OTHER LEARNERS, born yesterday, study every button Judith Hanson clicks. They follow her to the gargantuan film archive, where thirteen more years of new video have sprouted so far today. Learners have already watched billions of these clips and begin to make their inferences. They can identify faces now, and landmarks, books, paintings, buildings, and commercial products. Soon enough they’ll start guessing at what the films mean. Life is speculation, and these new speculations strain to come alive.
Mimi clicks. Videos line up beneath the headline clips, gathered by invisible agents smart enough to know that if Judith Hanson watched that she will surely want to watch these. Life Defense Force. Forest Wars. Redwood Summer.
Mimi binges. Each six-minute clip takes forever, and she rarely lasts more than a few dozen seconds. She clicks on a clip called ArBoReal. It was posted months ago and has already acquired thousands of thumbs up and down. The opening shot fades in from black on a clear-cut as far as the eye can see. Ancient wooden instruments play a resigned chorale prelude that unfolds so slowly, the whole intricate mechanism of its inner lines might as well be stopped. She doesn’t know the piece; the learners could tell her what it is. The learners can already name ten million tunes in a few notes.
The camera zooms in on a massive stump as big as a pocket theater. In one quick jump cut, three gas burners appear on top of the butte, belching fire. One more cut, and a tentlike circlet of fabric materializes, draped over the burners. The camera pans; the lens refocuses. The burners disgorge again. The circlet inflates into a brown and green tube. The tent lifts in time-lapse. Ten seconds, and Mimi realizes just which stump this must be. The learners don’t know, yet, but it won’t be long. They’ll understand everything she does, soon enough, and orders of magnitude more.
On her phone in a crowded park, Mimi watches the ghost tree materialize. It rises above the felled grove. It flaps in the breeze, a redwood leviathan come back to life. As the trunk grows, the camera pulls back to reveal it as the only thing standing in a landscape of stumps as level as a geometric proof. Fabulous, surreal, the hot-air tree billows up into gauzy apotheosis. Its dozen immense and sewn-together limbs probe around for secret compartments, for messages in the air.
She knows who made this tree. Filled out now, the plates of cinnamon bark streak black where fires burned them, centuries ago. Something encircles the great bole at its base. The sight freezes her. She thinks she’s hallucinating. But a close-up confirms the sight, even on a five-inch screen. All around the circumference, facing outward, knee to knee in a campfire ring, a ring of figures sits on the brink of enlightenment. It’s her arhats, in the exact postures from the scroll—their ro
bes, their hunched shoulders, their protruding ribs, the smiles across their sardonic faces. She sets the device down on the grass. She doesn’t understand. The film keeps going. Chinese characters run down the side of the floating tree. Even illiterate, she recognizes them from years of long looking:
On this mountain, in such weather,
Why stay here any longer?
Three trees wave to me with urgent arms.
Then she remembers the long hours Nicholas Hoel spent in her house. She can see him, sitting at the table and sketching, while the rest of them studied maps and planned attacks. It always bothered her, as if he were a courtroom artist documenting their trial in advance. Now she sees what he was sketching.
The tree on the screen of Mimi’s phone bucks in the air. Its limbs thrash. Smoke rises from the bottom of the shot. One of the burners ignites the base of the huge fabric column. Fire licks up the trunk, the way centuries of flames once lapped at Mimas. But this bark isn’t fire-resistant. In a moment, the column of heated silk both vaporizes upward and falls back toward the Earth like a failed space shot. Flaming limbs wave and drop. The ring of arhats glows yellow, then bright orange, then black as cinder.
Another few moments, and the entire sewn redwood smolders into ash. The chorale prelude stumbles through its last deceptive cadence and resolves to tonic. Then the shot itself blinks out in a trickle of smoke over the stumped hillside. As badly as she ever did, Mimi Ma wants to bomb something.
Through the blackness, words form again. The letters are made of autumn-tinted leaves, laid out with absurd patience in swaths across long tracts of forest floor:
For there is hope of a tree, if it
goes down, that it will sprout again,
and that its tender branches will not cease.
Though the root grows old in the earth,
and the stock dies in the ground, at the scent
of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs.
But man, man wastes away and dies
and gives up the ghost, and where is he?
The leaves blow away by twos and threes, vanishing in a stiff breeze. The film ends and asks her to rate it. She looks up on a hillside full of picnickers enjoying themselves on a perfect day.
NO CAMERA NOW. Nick is done with cameras. This piece must be its own and only record. He doesn’t know exactly where he is. North. In the woods. In other words, he’s lost. But sure enough, the trees around him aren’t. To the birds that woke him, every crook in every branch of each of these spruces and tamaracks and balsam firs has a name. He’s getting used to the idea that wherever he is, that’s where his largest and longest-lasting sculpture will be, until time and living creatures come to transform it.
The woods are blue-gray and covered in lichen. He works methodically, as he has for several days. He uses only those materials already on the ground, nudging fallen wood into the growing design. Some branches he can haul in his arms. Some trunks yield to dragging and rolling, via rope and a grappling hook. For other pieces, he needs a block and tackle, anchored to upright trees. Then there are the pieces too large for him to move. These must remain in place, dictating the design, its shape more discovered than invented.
With each rotted trunk he nudges into the pattern, the plan swells. He must keep the growing creature in his head, appraising the whole work as if from way on high. He learns, as he goes, how to lay the pieces out. There are so many ways to branch—more than infinite. He looks at the kinks and camber of each fallen limb and waits for it to tell him where, in the river of wood coursing across the ground, it wants to be.
Creatures let loose with cries, off in the woods and high above. Mosquitoes bloody his face and arms—the national bird, up here. Nick works for hours, neither stymied nor satisfied. He works until he’s hungry, then stops for lunch. There aren’t too many lunches left, and he hasn’t a clue how to forage for more. He sits on the spongy earth, shoveling handfuls of almonds and apricot into his mouth. Food from trees grown in California’s Central Valley on dwindling aquifers through years of drought.
He rises again and gets back to work. Wrestles with a log as thick as his thigh. A motion in the corner of his eye startles him. He cries out. There’s an audience for this piece—a man in a red plaid coat, jeans, and lumberjack boots, with a dog that must be three-quarters wolf. Both eye him with suspicion. “They said there was a crazy white man working out here.”
Nick fights to catch his breath. “That would be me.”
The visitor looks at Nicholas’s creation. The shape under construction unfolds in all directions. He shakes his head. Then he picks up a nearby fallen branch and fits it into the pattern.
THE LEARNERS can tell where the lines of poetry come from, even if Mimi can’t. Though the root grows old in the earth . . . She knows the words must go back, older even than the tree whose stump they eulogize. The bug boy, next to her, says something. She thinks he’s talking to his phone. “Everything okay?”
She tips her head and her face swells up. Her hands appear farther away than they ought to be. She’s sucking air. She tries to nod. She must try twice. “I’m fine. I’m good. . . .” Something in her wants to surrender and go to jail for the next two centuries.
PETABYTES OF AIRBORNE MESSAGES swarm all around in the air. They collect in sensors and bounce off satellites. They stream from the cameras now mounted in every building and on each intersection. They course in from pushpins all around her, up the great roots of population that split and spread at their intelligent tips: Sausalito, Mill Valley, San Rafael, Novato, Petaluma, Santa Rosa, Leggett, Fortuna, Eureka . . . Tendrils of data swell and merge, up and down this coast and deeper inland. Oakland, Berkeley, El Cerrito, El Sobrante, Pinole, Hercules, Rodeo, Crockett, Vallejo, Cordelia, Fairfield, Davis, Sacramento . . . Deep inference sweeps through the ravines, filling the level land with human ingenuity: San Bruno, Millbrae, San Mateo, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Watsonville, Castroville, Marina, Monterey, Carmel, Los Gatos, Cupertino, Santa Clara, Milpitas, Madrone, Gilroy, Salinas, Soledad, Greenfield, King City, Paso Robles, Atascadero, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, and on into the wilder fusing root masses of Los Angeles—a swelling clear-cut that only accelerates with each new slash. Bots watch and match, encode and see, gather and shape all the world’s data so quickly that the knowledge of humans stands still.
Neelay looks up from his code-filled screen. Grief washes over him, a grief youthful and full of expectation. He has felt grief before—that awful mix of hopes crushed and rising—but always for kin, colleagues, friends. It makes no sense, this grief for a place he won’t live long enough to see.
But he has glimpsed more than enough, and he would rather be here, launching the start of the rehabilitation, than live in the place that his learners will help repair. There’s a story he always loved, from the days when his legs still worked. Aliens land on Earth. They operate on a different scale of time. They zip around so fast that human seconds seem to them as tree years seem to humans. He can’t remember how the story ends. It doesn’t matter. Every branch’s tip has its own new bud.
. . .
MIMI SITS under those branches whose supple strength no engineer could improve upon. She tucks her feet up under her legs. Her head bows and her eyes close. The fingers of her left hand twist the band of jade around her right ring finger. She needs her sisters, but she can’t reach them. A call would be worthless. Even traveling to see them would do nothing. Mimi needs them as little girls, dangling their feet from the branches of a nonexistent tree.
The jade mulberry spins under her fingers: Fusang, this magic continent, the country of the future. A new Earth now. She pulls at the ring, but her fingers have swollen, or the green band has grown too narrow to remove. The skin on the back of her hand is as papery and dry as birch bark. Somehow, she has become an old woman.
The length of her accomplice’s sentence spreads out in front of her, one day after the other. Seventy plus
seventy years. Then Maple is there again, behind the log fortress wall they built to defend Deep Creek. The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.
The hair stands up all over her papery skin. That’s what he has tried to make. That’s why he let the state put him away for two lifetimes and still incriminated no one. He has traded his life for a fable that might light up the minds of strangers. One that refuses the judgment of the world and all its blindness. One that tells her to hold still, take his gift, and go on living.
ADAM LIES bound in his prison bed, replaying those words he spoke to his wife a week before trial, the ones that turned whatever residual feelings she still had for him into rage and hate. If I save myself, I lose something else.
What? Lois hissed. What else is there, Adam?
The learners can’t tell, yet, what the fight is over. They can’t yet tell the difference between remorse and defiance, hope and fear, blindness and wisdom. But they’ll learn soon enough. A human can feel only so many things, and once you enumerate them all, once you sample seven billion examples from each of seven billion humans and fit them together in their trillion trillion contexts, all things begin to come clear.
Adam himself is still learning what he meant. Still trying to figure out the uses of a useless choice. All day long now, in this holding cell, he reviews the evidence. He can’t say, yet, what his life was worth or what branch it should have followed. He still isn’t sure what else besides the self there is to save or lose. He has some time to think about this. Seventy plus seventy years.
WHILE THE PRISONER THINKS, innovations surge over his head, across the flyover from Portland and Seattle to Boston and New York and back again. In the time it takes the man to form one self-judging thought, a billion packets of program pass over. They course under the sea in great cables—buzzing between Tokyo, Chengdu, Shenzhen, Bangalore, Chicago, Dublin, Dallas, and Berlin. And the learners begin to turn all this data into sense.
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